TONIC: A teamwork simulator and digital twin for organizational innovation challenges

Efficient collaboration is the cornerstone of most successful projects and organizations are increasingly seeking tools to optimize their team formation processes. In this paper, we introduce an agent-based simulator designed for team formation in open collaboration settings, specifically innovation hackathons. The tool models and simulates three distinct team formation approaches: bottom-up team formation, where users self-organize with minimal algorithm intervention, top-down team formation, and hybrid team formation. With a broad range of customizable parameters, our tool can serve as a digital twin for collaboration within organizations, permitting organizational decision-makers to design tailored scenarios according to their team formation requirements, utilize existing models or develop their own, and evaluate the effectiveness of their team building approaches prior to real-world implementation.